This is a portion the history that many Americans do not know very well, or refuse to acknowledge.

A story steeped in the blood of fearless partisans and freedom fighters, to whom I am related to. The story of how badly the West turned it's collective back on Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia after World War Two. Being mostly of Lithuanian descent, this hits HOME for me. We had relatives who were among these freedom fighting partisans and sadly I do not know the names. These stories that were shared with me by my grandfather and an uncle I only had the pleasure of seeing five or six times in my life. Stories that were shared as far as I know, with just me and my mother. My two older brothers never cared or showed an interest in history. My grandfather passed away in 1972 and my mother in 2003. I have always loved history. When it comes to U.S., Germany and Russian history, I could never read or research enough. It was my grandfather who got me started in this area of study which ultimately lead me to get my bachelors degree in American military history.

What the West did to these Baltic states is disgusting.

"For
several years after World War the Balts believed that the U.S. and
other Allied powers would come to their rescue and help to free them
from the Soviet occupation. This was fatal.

The
partisan leaders were familiar with the Atlantic Charter, which was
signed by Churchill and Roosevelt 12 August 1941 aboard the U.S. cruiser
Augusta in Newfoundland, a charter later acceded to on 1 January 1942
by all countries involved in the war against Germany and Japan -
including the Soviet Union. This declaration stated that all territorial
changes resulting from the war would only take place after the
population's own desires, and that any people should have the right
freely to choose their form of government.

What
the Baltic people did not know, was that their case head was not at
all discussed when the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, the
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Soviet leader Josef Stalin
in February 1945 met in the city of Yalta on the Black Sea to lay the
conditions for peace and the post-war period. The Baltic States were
totally forgotten; but they did not know about it, and therefore
continued the impossible fight against the evil superior force until
1953.

It
has been speculated that Roosevelt's failing health may have been the
reason why Stalin so easily got the upper hand at the Yalta
Conference. The outcome was, in any case, very tragic for the Baltic
States, and only in 2005 the American president, George W. Bush came
here to apologise on behalf of the United States. Russia’s President,
Vladimir Putin, was also asked to apologise for the atrocities against
the Baltic States in the years after Yalta. But Russia still
considers that they 'liberated' the Baltics and sees no reason to
excuse themselves. It went even so far that Putin declared Lithuania's
President Valdas Adamkus 'persona non grata' after the latter refused
to come to Moscow to participate in Russia’s anniversary celebration of
the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany on 9 May 2005.

In
the years after WWII a number of Lithuanian agents were amazingly
capable of getting in and out of the country several times, and in
December 1947 a full delegation travelled to Western Europe to present
their case to the Pope and to Western governments. But no countries
or leaders dared go into conflict with Stalin's Soviet Union, and
Lithuanians call for help was largely met with deaf ears.

Though
not quite. Both U.S. and UK intelligence agencies gave their orders
to see what might be done to create secret anti-communist
organizations and operations behind the Iron Curtain. They also helped
to organise the radio stations 'Radio Liberty' and 'Radio Free
Europe', which for many years thereafter conveyed useful information
to the Baltics. In 1951 came the 'Voice of America' on air, and thus
gave hundreds of thousands of Baltic war refugees in the United States
a voice back to their home countries at the Baltic Sea.

Unfortunately,
the success of the Western intelligence services and their 'relief
efforts' very much failed, which in retrospect largely is attributed
to the British intelligence officer Kim Philby, the man who in reality
was a Soviet spy who unfortunately contributed so actively to the
killing of tens of thousands of Baltic people."

There are two parts to this post. The first one I will post up below and the second part will follow tomorrow, yes on Memorial Day with one other post from me. There is a method to my 'madness' regarding the order of these posts. The lessons and parallels from how the West abandoned the Baltic states after WW2 have DIRECT and possibly STAGGERING implications for those of us who treasure true freedom, liberty and our Constitution here in the States, now at this very moment. This history takes on an even deeper, more profound and sobering importance for our children and their grandchildren. PatriotUSA

Lithuanian ‘forest brothers’ from the so-called "Vytis" military district.

EUROPE’S LONGEST AND BLOODIEST

GUERILLA WAR IN MODERN TIMES

THE BALTIC STATES 1944 – 1953

Text: Aage Myhre

Pictures: Mostly from the KGB Museum in Vilnius

Tell a Lithuanian that it was today, the 9th of May 1945, that his country was liberated and peace after WWII restored.Tell
him that this 2010 May it is 65 years since the Soviet Union and
the Western world defeated Hitler's Nazi regime, and that Lithuania
since then has been a free, happy country in line with what other
European countries experienced after they were occupied in 1939
–1940 and liberated in 1945. Do not be surprised if you get an angry
and annoyed look back.For
while we in the Western world, in Russia and in other parts of
the world joyfully could celebrate the liberation and the
recovered freedom after the World War, Lithuania, the other two Baltic
states, and Ukraine were forced to realize that one war had been
replaced by a new, much bloodier and more protracted war, lasting
from 1944 to at least 1953.What we in the west celebrated in May 1945 was by Lithuanians and the other occupied countries experienced only in 1990 –1991.

The end of World War II saw Germany dramatically reduced in size. Before long

it was also divided into East and West.Germany's defeat meant that Poland

and Czechoslovakia returned to the map of Europe after a six-year absence.

But not so for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and northern East Prussia

(Kaliningrad) that all remained occupied by the USSR.

Western
radio stations told us, who were lucky enough to grow up on the western
side of the iron curtain, thoroughly about the Hungarian uprising
against the Soviet intervention in 1956, an uprising that resulted in
2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet soldiers losing their lives.

Western
television stations showed us in detail what happened when
Czechoslovakia was invaded in 1968 by more than 200,000 troops from the
Warsaw Pact countries Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Hungary and
Bulgaria - with the outcome that 72 Czechs and Slovaks were killed when
they tried to resist.

However,
we got almost nothing to know about the many, many times bloodier
uprising against the Soviet that was happening right outside our own
front door, in the Baltic States, through nine long years from 1944 to
1953.

It
is estimated that approximately 30,000 Balts and 100,000 Soviet
soldiers died in this bloody guerrilla war when Estonians, Latvians and
Lithuanians withdrew into the woods to organize its powerful armed
partisan resistance after the Soviet Union at the end of the second
World War, in 1944, pushed the German forces out, and Stalin decided
to incorporate the Baltic States into his powerful autocracy instead
of giving these countries their freedom and independence back. Today
we know that this tragic, involuntary occupation and oppression was to
last the whole 47 years, from 1944 to 1991.

Stalin’s Soviet deported approximately 600,000 individuals from the Baltic States to Siberia.

Around 100,000 of them never returned to their homelands.

In
addition to the 30,000 Balts who died in direct combats with the Red
Army during this nine-year guerrilla war, comes all those who died in or
on their way to Siberia, all because of their resistance to the Soviet
raids home in the Baltics. It is considered that Josef Stalin was
responsible for the deportation of not less than 600,000 Baltic people
to the permafrost concentration camps and the gulag prisons during these
years, and that probably as many as 100,000 of them died during the
stay or during the three-month journey where they were stuffed into icy
cold, miserable cattle wagons with thin straw mats as mattresses, and
very limited food rations to survive on during the long way to the cold
hell, thousands of kilometres north and east.

We
speak, in other words, about an almost unimaginable and too little
known purges of totally 130,000 people from the Baltic States during the
very first years after the Second World War. But let us not forget
that also the approximately 100,000 Soviet soldiers who died were
victims of the same madness that almost a quarter million people were
exposed to by an inhuman despot, still by many is regarded as a hero
in Russia, Georgia and other former Soviet republics. The despot Adolf
Hitler almost pales in comparison.

In
comparison, 58,000 Americans died during the Vietnam War in the years
1960-75, and we were all fed with regular updates on how the war
evolved, almost minute by minute.

The
distance between the free, western country of Sweden and Lithuania is
less than 300 kilometres, shorter than the distance between Vilnius and
Klaipeda. But despite the short distance, there was remarkable little
information that reached the West about the tragic carnage that took
place so close to our own front doors after the war.

We
probably had enough to lick our wounds after five years of occupation
and the World War II. Even today there are very few people who know
much about the bloody Baltic guerrilla war. This is, for example all
my Norwegian Encyclopaedia gives of information:"The
armed resistance against the Soviet regime took the form of
guerrilla groups in the forests (forest brothers) and had a large
scope. Only in 1953 the armed resistance ebbed out."

Lithuania’s WWII: Torn apart by two super powers.

Many
of the partisans were young men returning to Lithuania from the West
after WWII to fight for their beloved home country. Here are three of
them, with their official and nick names: K. Sirvys - "Sakalas", J.
Luksa - "Skirmantas", B. Trumpys - "Rytis". Very few ‘Western
partisans’ returned to the West. Almost all of them were killed by the
Soviets.

Partisans,
or "forest brothers" as they called themselves, were found in all three
Baltic countries, but it was in Lithuania that the major groupings were
found. It was also here that the really huge death tolls came. It is
considered that 22,000 partisans and 70,000 soldiers from the Red Army
and NKVD were killed in Lithuania alone, this in addition to the
approximately 60,000 Lithuanians who died in Siberia during the early
post war years.

The
Lithuanian partisans usually appeared in uniforms, with national
insignias and identification of rank as like other nations' armies. It
is said that the Lithuanian soldiers always saved the last bullet for
themselves; they knew all too well that torture, a symbolic trial and
execution by hanging, head shot or group execution awaited them if
they were captured.

The post war Guerrilla War in Lithuania is normally divided into three different phases:

- The first phase lasted from July 1944 to May 1946, with violent skirmishes and casualties on both sides.More than 10,000 forest brothers lost their lives in battles and skirmishes during these two years.Partisans captured during this period
small towns from the Soviet forces, local quisling units were disarmed
and the occupants’ offices were destroyed.But the big losses meant that tactics had to be changed.

-
The second phase lasted from May 1946 until November 1948. The
Lithuanian units were then divided into smaller groups that hid in
well-camouflaged bunkers. During this period a joint command was
established for all Lithuanian forces fighting against the occupying
army. Contacts were also made contacts with the West in this period,
but no help arrived.

-
The final phase lasted until May 1953. And despite the brutal
oppression and forced collectivization, around 2,000 partisans were
still active with their armed resistance against the occupation. During
this period, they also worked extensively with informing the
Lithuanian people by publishing newspapers, books and
leaflets. Circulation varied from a few hundred to 5,000. Such
publications lasted until 1959.

There
were also parallel battles against Soviet forces in Estonia and in
Latvia, but in much smaller scale. Only in Western Ukraine, there was
fighting in the same scale as in Lithuania.

The Forest Brothers often used cellars, tunnels or more complex

underground bunkers as their hideouts, such as the one depicted here.

The
Baltic Partisan War came mostly to an end by May 1953, two months after
Joseph Stalin died. But the last active resistance man in Lithuania
shot himself, rather than surrender, as late as 1965, and the last
partisan did not come out from his hiding place before 1986, 42 years
after the guerrilla war in the Baltics started.

In
1955, the Soviet-controlled 'Radio Vilnius’ offered amnesty to all
the partisans who were still hiding in Lithuania's deep forests, and in
1956 the KGB repeated a similar provision. Such amnesty-deals were of
course meant only to lure the last forest brothers, so when the famous
partisan leader 'Hawk' was taken that the same year, he was
immediately given a symbolic trial and executed. Hawk was an
American-born Lithuanian who had returned to his home country to fight
the Soviet occupation.

Instead
of giving themselves over to the Soviet occupiers, many chose to
commit suicide, often by exploding a grenade right in their own faces
in order to destroy them so much that they would not be identifiable and
thereby create a risk to their relatives' lives. Such suicides
occurred until around 1960. Many also managed to obtain false identity
and get back into society without being detected.

Many
of the Soviet Union's atrocities against the Baltic States have only
come to light in earnest after 1991 when these countries regained
their freedom and independence. A large part of the archives that
mentioned the said matters were, however, brought to Moscow to prevent
the World from having access to these highly revealing documents.

But,
strangely, in 1994 a former KGB officer decided to go to the
Lithuanian authorities with detailed information about how torture and
executions had taken place at the KGB headquarters in the Vilnius city
centre. He told that there had been secret burials for the victims,
just on the outskirts of Vilnius. When the huge mass grave he had told
about was found and opened, several hundred corpses of partisans were
discovered, all in Lithuanian uniforms, and all obviously tortured to
death.

One
can ask whether it was a fatal mistake for a small country like
Lithuania to so aggressively a predominance they had to understand they
would not be able to defeat. Admittedly, there is a general perception
that Lithuania thereby was avoiding most of the ‘russification’ that
Stalin and later leaders implemented in all other Soviet
republics. The Russians were simply too afraid of the Lithuanians as a
result of the strong opposition during the post-war years, hence the
proportion of Russians in Lithuania today represents only 6% of the
population, compared to more than 30% in Latvia and around 25% in
Estonia.

But
the bloodshed in the Baltics, and the incredibly extensive
deportations to Siberia, as a result of the partisan opposition, made
that these three countries lost too many of their best men and
women. The hero status they may have achieved around the world never
became significantly large. We in the West did not know what really
happened, and when we finally learned, far too many decades have
passed to achieve a proper attention for the heroes, the very
guerrilla war, the deportations and the unbelievable sufferings the
Baltic people underwent on the Siberian permafrost during the 1940s
and 1950s.

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have paid
an extremely high price for their rebellion behaviours, and are unlikely
ever to receive the honour and the redress they deserve for their
courage to fight the injustice they were subjected to during the
ruthless Soviet period.

When World War II ended, the West chose to forget Lithuania

The historic meeting near the end of World War II, the Yalta Conference, became fatal for Lithuania.

It involved three key allied leaders. Left to right: Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom;

Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States; and Joseph Stalin, Premier of the Soviet Union.

For
several years after World War the Balts believed that the U.S. and
other Allied powers would come to their rescue and help to free them
from the Soviet occupation. This was fatal.

The
partisan leaders were familiar with the Atlantic Charter, which was
signed by Churchill and Roosevelt 12 August 1941 aboard the U.S. cruiser
Augusta in Newfoundland, a charter later acceded to on 1 January 1942
by all countries involved in the war against Germany and Japan -
including the Soviet Union. This declaration stated that all territorial
changes resulting from the war would only take place after the
population's own desires, and that any people should have the right
freely to choose their form of government.

What
the Baltic people did not know, was that their case head was not at
all discussed when the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, the
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Soviet leader Josef Stalin
in February 1945 met in the city of Yalta on the Black Sea to lay the
conditions for peace and the post-war period. The Baltic States were
totally forgotten; but they did not know about it, and therefore
continued the impossible fight against the evil superior force until
1953.

It
has been speculated that Roosevelt's failing health may have been the
reason why Stalin so easily got the upper hand at the Yalta
Conference. The outcome was, in any case, very tragic for the Baltic
States, and only in 2005 the American president, George W. Bush came
here to apologise on behalf of the United States. Russia’s President,
Vladimir Putin, was also asked to apologise for the atrocities against
the Baltic States in the years after Yalta. But Russia still
considers that they 'liberated' the Baltics and sees no reason to
excuse themselves. It went even so far that Putin declared Lithuania's
President Valdas Adamkus 'persona non grata' after the latter refused
to come to Moscow to participate in Russia’s anniversary celebration of
the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany on 9 May 2005.

In
the years after WWII a number of Lithuanian agents were amazingly
capable of getting in and out of the country several times, and in
December 1947 a full delegation travelled to Western Europe to present
their case to the Pope and to Western governments. But no countries
or leaders dared go into conflict with Stalin's Soviet Union, and
Lithuanians call for help was largely met with deaf ears.

Though
not quite. Both U.S. and UK intelligence agencies gave their orders
to see what might be done to create secret anti-communist
organizations and operations behind the Iron Curtain. They also helped
to organise the radio stations 'Radio Liberty' and 'Radio Free
Europe', which for many years thereafter conveyed useful information
to the Baltics. In 1951 came the 'Voice of America' on air, and thus
gave hundreds of thousands of Baltic war refugees in the United States
a voice back to their home countries at the Baltic Sea.

Unfortunately,
the success of the Western intelligence services and their 'relief
efforts' very much failed, which in retrospect largely is attributed
to the British intelligence officer Kim Philby, the man who in reality
was a Soviet spy who unfortunately contributed so actively to the
killing of tens of thousands of Baltic people.

The
intelligence organizations' attempts to help the Baltic States
irritated Stalin violently, and he therefore imposed increasingly tough
measures against the uprisings. His NKVD (later renamed the KGB) had
more or less free hands to exercise extensive torture against
individuals and groups believed being in league with the partisans.
Vague suspicions were enough to allow use of cruel torture methods.
Many were hanged or shot without any real form of litigation. A huge
number of relatives and family members of the partisans were sent to
slave labour camps in Siberia. All private farms were incorporated
into collective farms to prevent them from continuing to provide food
to the partisans, and many farmers were deported to Siberia. The West's
attempts to help got quite the reverse effect. Tyranny had triumphed,
and our close neighbours on the Baltic Sea's south coast were once again
suffering in a most cruel way.

One of the many killed Lithuanian partisans, Juozas Luksa –

"Skirmantas", "Daumantas", after his death on the 4th of September 1951.

Photo: KGB

Few
in the West know that Lithuania 500 years ago was considered Europe's
largest country, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Few in our
today's West know the proud and honourable cultural history of the
Baltic countries, or that these countries were economically fully on par
with Scandinavia until World War II, and few know about the heroic
guerrilla war these three nations fought against the mighty Soviet Union
after WWII.

During
five world war years, the Baltic area became the incredibly bloody
and sad battlefield where Stalin and Hitler pushed each other back and
forth, with fatal and almost incomprehensible destruction and murders
of hundreds of thousands innocent people as result. It was here that
the Holocaust saw its very worst outcome on Earth, when 95% of the
large Jewish population of Lithuania was exterminated. It was here that
Europe's longest and bloodiest guerrilla war and the ensuing mass
deportations to Siberia took place through more than a decade during
and after WWII.

Hundreds
of thousands of our closest neighbours died just outside our own
front door (or were deported to the gulag camps in the permafrost of
Siberia). These terrible things happened only 300 kilometres away from
Lithuania’s closest Western coast, at the same time as we westerners
celebrated our new freedom and the beginning of the new era we today
know as the proud Western World. Didn’t we know, or did we prefer not to know?

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